Autodesk (NASDAQ:ADSK) resellers will soon have the keys to the vendor’s entire software portfolio.
Last April the software firm revealed it planned to remove any barriers to partners looking to sell across its portfolio. Now the firm has set a date of February 1, 2012 for making its products available to all VARs.
Explains Raymond Savona, VP EMEA channel sales at Autodesk: “Over last several years the Autodesk portfolio has really grown. Every customer is unique in the problems they face with design challenges; partners having access to the entire portfolio can help solve these problems.”
Autodesk last year reduced its partner authorisations from 19 to five. It then later reduced this figure to just one single authorisation. At the same time the vendor introduced a number of specialisations for its resellers. The first, consulting, was rolled out last year, followed by structural engineering, simulation and analysis and infrastructure design. Savona adds the company plans to introduce more in 2012.
“[Removing the authorisations] could be confusing so we introduced specialisations to help customers find the partner with the right skills. Partners also can focus their investment and training on particular areas,” he told Channel Pro.
Savona said Autodesk will also focus on formalising its tiered partner structure in 2012, “to bring the benefits more in line with the investments partners are making. There will be a greater differentiation based on those tiers,” he maintains. The firm has a traditional Bronze, Silver, Gold tiered structure, plus a Platinum tier introduced last year.
“In the past we were fairly homogenous in how we distributed benefits – now there will be more segmentation, with more benefits going to larger investments,” he explains.
Savona says the firm will take customer satisfaction, and a VAR’s maintenance and subscription business into account as well as financial investment.
In addition, February 1 will mark the start of Autodesk’s DVAR strategy in UK, enabling some VARs to bypass distribution and buy directly from the vendor, as already occurs in some other in European countries. Savona says the select group of VARs have now all been told of the option, though he says the firm “probably won’t know which [will decided to buy direct] until the end of this month or beginning of February.”
He adds: “Clearly a requirement is that a partner has to be large enough to purchase directly from us. But we’re not necessarily trying to attract [VARs] to buy directly from us, and I don’t think it will change the landscape that much.
“It’s a matter of figuring out what’s right for their business.”
He also believes the acquisition last year by Tech Data (Nasdaq:TECD) of the distribution business of Autodesk specialist distributor Man and Machine has had ‘little impact’ on the market.
